Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1869 - Dr. Gabor Mate
Uploaded: 2022-09-13T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1869 - Dr. Gabor Mate' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-09-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1869 - Dr. Gabor Mate' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-09-13. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1869 - Dr. Gabor Mate

The Joe Rogan Experience
Pleasure to meet you. I've really enjoyed your conversations online. I love
your perspective and it's really a real pleasure to have you in here
Well, I really am happy to be here with you. Thank you. My pleasure. This book
the myth of normal. This is your book
Yeah, it's called the myth of normal trauma illness and healing in a toxic
culture and it kind of sums up everything I've ever learned
What exactly is toxic about our culture? Is that a too big question? No, it's
it's the
It's the central question. Yeah
If you imagine you're a microbiologist in a laboratory growing microorganisms
in a Petri dish, that's called a culture
you know, you put in a brew and
With the right nutrients and the microorganisms thrive and they multiply
But if a lot of them start getting sick and let them start dying you'd say this
is a toxic culture
Now if you look at what happening in North America now
There's an article in the New York Times 10 days before we speak of a teenager
being on 10 different psychiatric medications
10 different psychiatric medications
More and more kids are being diagnosed with ADHD with anxiety with depression
the rate of childhood suicide is going up and they'll be saying what's going on
here?
Why is this going on?
More and more people getting autoimmune disease
Mental health issues the overdose crisis in the states over a hundred thousand
people died of overdoses
Either we assume that these are all accidents and sort of
Blows of misfortune or we get that there's something about this culture that's
fomenting so much illness
70% of American adults or on at least one medication
70 70 yeah 50 40 percent are on about two at least
That's a toxic culture. There's all kinds of I could talk about what makes it
that way
But when I talk about toxic culture, I'm talking about its impact on the people
who inhabit it
So this toxic culture are you just talking about?
The the overall way human beings communicate is it the way we're being raised
is it the foods weed is it everything it's all done
It's all and salient amongst them how we raise our kids
What about how we raise our kids?
well
If you look at how human beings evolved
over millions really of years and
hundreds of thousands of years and even our own species has been on the earth
for about 150 200,000 years
For all that time until the blink of an eye ago we lived out in nature in small
band hunter gatherer groups
Where kids are raised communally so that there wasn't just an isolated the
nuclear family or isolated mother or father was?
grandparents and uncles and aunts and the whole community it takes a village as
the saying goes it takes a whole community now
Children also were picked up
When they cried in fact, they were never even put down they slept with the
parents
They were breastfed for three or four years
in today's society
And I can start even before that already we know that stresses on the pregnant
women have a negative impact on the infant
Physiological impact on the infant's brain development. This is not even
controversial
In our society, we don't pay attention to women's emotional needs when they're
pregnant
And we don't pay attention to the child's emotional needs so the child needs to
be held and accepted unconditionally
No, you know our society. We actually tell parents not to pick up the kids when
they're crying. Yeah, and that is an insult and add trauma to the child
and that has a child impact on the child's trust in the world
sense of safety sense of belonging how they feel about themselves
You know in the book I talk about my mom and I talk about my own infancy in Budapest,
Hungary as a Jewish infant other than Nazis
So you can imagine how stressed my mom was
but forget the Nazis for a minute I
read her diary and
She writes this is when I'm two weeks of age and we're in the maternity
hospital and she says
My poor little Gabor my heart is breaking for you because you want to be fed
and you're hungry
But I promised the doctor I would only feed you every four hours and you've
been crying for the last hour and a half
What's it like for an infant to lie there next to their mom and not be picked
up and fed for an hour and a half
Now try telling a mother baboon or a mother cat or a mother bear to ignore the
child's distress for an hour and a half
So the very advice that you would give to a lot of parents these days
Already damages the child. Where was that? Where's that advice coming from?
Like who are the experts that thought it was a good idea to not pick up
children when they're crying?
It's been going on for about a hundred years
It may be even longer
Dr. Spock, I don't remember the name Benjamin Spock
his
book was just the most influential parenting Bible for decades to the 50s in
the 60s in the 70s and
He talked about the tyranny of the baby wants to be picked up
He says so how you deal with that is you walk out and you shut the door and you
don't go back in other words
You isolate the infant
now
Look at how hunter gatherers raise rituals. They carry their babies everywhere
I met a Cree woman once who told me in our community
Kids weren't even allowed to touch the ground for two years. They're just held
all the time
So it's modern life. It's the pressure and stresses of modern life
Acting on parents that makes it so difficult for them to really be there for
the kids now
My mother's heart was breaking she went against her own instincts to follow the
doctor's advice
Again, you tell a mother rat or mother baboon to ignore the baby's cries
And you find out what mother rage is all about and what does this effect of not
holding babies and not?
Comforting them when they cry. What does this have on the child?
well
Let's say you're my friend. Okay, and
You come to me for help as an adult
And I ignore you
What's the impact on you? What are you gonna believe?
I don't know I mean if if you ignore me I'm gonna
Take into account what the rest of the world says you might but what would you
believe about my attitude towards you?
I would think you're ambivalent. Yeah, and I don't care and exactly that's
exactly the impact on the child
Not consciously but unconsciously the child makes the assumption that there's
something wrong with me. I'm not lovable
No, the world is an unsafe place because we learn about
our
Worlds through how we interact with our caregivers
That's the template. I mean if you ever raise the puppy dog
You know that how you treat that little
Infant animal has a huge impact on what kind of a creature
They're gonna develop into all human beings are the same in fact even more so
Because we're more dependent and more helpless than the average animal is so we
need that care and that connection
even more
Powerfully so when we were lacking it the infant assumes
Unconsciously that there's something wrong with them. They're not lovable. The
world is not this trusting place
Then we spend our lives
acting out from that
unconscious belief so
The majority or a large portion of our culture
Develops as a child with this problem
In in this world. Yes in this world very much so then
Then there is the like if you look at what the
What a psychologist friend of mine calls the irreducible needs of children
Irreducible meaning that if you don't meet these needs
There's gonna be negative consequences
The first one is unconditional loving acceptance
Just the sense of belonging attachment it's called
Connection the infant needs that
You know how baby elephant is born
When the mother elephant goes into labor
All the mother elephants stand around in the circle
When the infant plops on the ground they all reach out their trunks and they
stroke the infant
That's natural instinct you belong to us
You're welcome here
Now the human infant needs that at least as much as the baby elephant
Now so the first need is this unconditional loving
welcome in the world
The second need of the child is
that the child shouldn't have to work
to be loved to be accepted
I shouldn't have to be pretty smart successful
compliant
good nice anything
I'm just
I shouldn't have to work
for what is my birthright which is to be accepted
as a person with value and worth
and lovable in their own right that's the second you know the third need is
the freedom to experience all our emotions
okay all our emotions now our brains have emotional circuits
um
for rage which we need to protect ourselves
for lust which we need to reproduce
for seeking curiosity to explore and get to know our world
one of the one of the
and there's other emotional circuits as well for care so that we can look after
each other
these are circuits that were nature evolution has wired us with this has been
studied
now
so one of the needs we have is the freedom to experience all our emotions all
our emotions
our gut feelings and everything else
a lot of parenting experts will tell you an angry child should be made to sit
by themselves
so that they come back to normal
i'm quoting a very i'm quoting a very famous person here
um a psychologist who said this in his book
an angry child should be made to sit by themselves so that they come back to
normal
now what's the message to the child
anger is not normal
if you want to belong to us you have to suppress your anger
now suppressing the anger is a trauma
because anger is given to us by nature as a natural boundary defense
if i enter your space in a
way that threatens you you better get angry with me
get out that's healthy anger
if i suppress that
if i depress it
push it down
30 years later you're diagnosed with this disease called depression
it's not a disease
it was your response to the stupid advice of the parenting experts that your
mothers and your
fathers believed they should follow it's a coping mechanism you pushed on the
anger to be accepted by your environment
but later on that causes you problems mental health issues and physical health
issues
so when i'm talking about irreducible needs i'm talking about the real needs
and in this society
parents are told to keep ignoring their own parenting instincts to make the
child behave
the way they expect them to behave and the result is a lot of kids are hurt
without parent
meaning to hurt them they love their kids they do their best
but because of this culture they actually end up hurting the kids
so this is standard in america pretty much and you feel like this is the base
of this host of psychological problems
well i wouldn't want to put everything down to just one dynamic right but it's
certainly
what happens to children in the first three years is a huge template for
problems later on
and once a child develops and becomes an adult and has all these issues that
are connected to the
way they were raised what can be done then well that's where the process of
healing has to begin and
um by the way um but okay yeah let me let me deal with the question um what can
be done then well the first
thing we have to do is to recognize what's going on that that that that what
happened to me like
if i can talk about my own example okay so
medical doctor i'm in my 40s successful physician newspaper columnist respected
good income and all that
but i'm a workaholic i have to be working if i'm not working i'm kind of
depressed and um alienated
which is how my family experiences me including my young kids but why am i that
way because as a jewish
infant under the nazis the message i got is that the world didn't want me now
not because the nazis
directly affected me as an infant although we lived under nazi occupation in my
first year of life
so my mother was her our life was under daily threat in the book there's a
painting of my mother and i
with her wearing a yellow star when i was 11 months old she handed me the
complete stranger in the street
to save my life in budapest i stood on that very pavement just a couple of
months ago when i visited
my birth city so she gives me the total stranger to convey me to some relatives
in hiding because
she thinks where we're living i'm not going to 